Bases of a Social Technocracy (I haven't found anything similar so far).

I had a wild idea long ago, about the creation of a social technocratic government system based on three principles:

1) The broad objective is to promote social development and better living standards, not economic growth, assuming the first will lead to the latter eventually and not vice-versa.

2) The main focus will always be to promote education in all its forms (Arts & Science), with emphasis on freedom and accessibility of information for everyone.

3) The government is a tool for the people to serve themselves therefore it should be easy to use and efficient; public services are created on basis of legal social contracts which can be overridden.

Ideally this would be a retroactive system; the more education given to the people, the better the quality of the people in charge. Encouraging rationalism, and discouraging blind idealism and specially proselytism. It is expected that the person in power is "not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of [his] character." (Paraphrasing MLKJr.)

The government should be composed of three bodies,the popular body (which is elected as a democracy, and advocates for the morality), the technical body (which elects members on project basis, and advocates for the rationality) & the auditing body (which supervises and accounts for efficiency, and represents the viability). The majority of vote is slightly balanced towards the technical body.

The thing about the technical body is that it the members are chosen like in a free market, whoever does the best job gets the contract. This person is appointed by a panel of scholars, is fully accountable for his actions and is constantly evaluated by the auditing and technical bodies for performance on basis of the logic of their ideas as well as the returns on investment. There is no time limit, the person can be replaced a week later if he is not suitable, or stay forever if he is the best in what he does.

Other things that I believe that should to be taken into consideration are:
- assuming human fallibility and imperfection.
- an adapting governmental structure, to grow alongside a dynamic governing body.
- an emphasis on foresight; government that works in every generation and failing/divided/broken circumstances.
- trial and error; build a structure through testing what works, in the same manner evolution does.
- get insight from experts in evolutionary science, psychology, anthropology/sociology in how groups work; how do governed groups behave at different scales (thousands vs millions), in different environments (cities vs suburbs). What is the optimum population for effective governance?
- what can we learn from open source/open culture that can be applied to a new governmental structure?

I have put a lot of thought into this same idea of rethinking and redesigning the system through which societies work and grow together. I’m not sure your idea will ever exist, but I think rethinking government is something that leads to societal change so should be encouraged.

Sep 8 2011:
That's actually what I'm posting it for to figure out how could it get scrambled. I know no system is perfect, but as in businesses, plans have to be put to test to recognize major flaws before they happen.

Sep 8 2011:
In addition to issues of being scrambled at birth (which is inevitable human flaw), there is the lack of foresight of the power of individuals, who don't like the idea because it's ideologically threatening or because it's not actually working. Marxism/Socialism is detested in America because of the former reason.

The solution I see to this is forming a governmental STRUCTURE, separate from the governing body itself, so that the government can adapt as generations evolve:

It separates the logic of the ways a government is run, from the use of that government. (It's like the difference between building a web application's administrative functions and actually using those administrative functions.) We should have a government structure, which provides the means through which a society can govern itself — then society can use that structure to build its laws.

Just as importantly, it forces the means of government to remain independent of ideological influences. For example, where American government fails is that its administrative structure is too specific to the administrative functions at the time. In an analogy, the code used to build a custom blog’s administration panel in 1999 for a foot cream site is still being used in 2011, heavily modified, for a YouTube-like site. Not only is the code old, the context changed drastically — just as society changes.

Many of the ideas in the constitution are just old ideas. The right to bear arms in the constitution was an entirely different idea in 1800 than in it is now in 2011. Had this been changed several times in the past 100 years, alongside the development of much deadlier weapons, there would be less argument and potentially more progress.

Sep 8 2011:
QUOTE: "Marxism/Socialism is detested in America because of this."

I do not think Marxism/Socialism is detested in America because it doesn't work; it is detested because it is ideologically inconsistent with the American image of itself.

The fact is socialism does "work." As much as we can say any system works. The star on the stage at the moment is socialist. And there are many countries that practice socialism ... to a degree. Even America.

The notion that 7 billion people can be governed is, in itself, faulty That we can be governed by a single system is folly. At least for the foreseeable future. We cannot even agree on what basic ideas mean ... freedom, liberty, justice. They mean different things to different people.

Sep 8 2011:
That would be a problem, because you can't really implement the logic behind it to a democracy. Democracies are based not on actual factual competences, but on perception of competences. That is why we choose the guy/girl who looks like can do the job instead of the guy/girl that actually knows how to do the job.

Sep 8 2011:
Could be. If I was to pick one part it would be the three basic principles, specially the first one. The guidance of governments on economic gain while neglecting the well-being of the people seems to me like the major problem that democracies suffer these days.

Sep 4 2011:
I would love for such a thing to exist but there is one fatal flaw. Humans are not like that. Logic doesn't work with everyone and there will always be that nut who will not see reason. This method is only usable if there was a new world where highly educated unbiased people could start a fresh new life. Even one unthinking radical would spoil such a society. What would you do with people who clearly refuse to think in a logical manner?

Sep 4 2011:
Ideally with this system, that way of thinking would cease to exist. But you are right, some people still prefer to live in the darkness. I was counting more on the good will of the new movements to get it running in the first place.

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